Software is at the core of so many of the tools we use today: Nearly everyone uses social networks to communicate, many people have Internet-connected computers in their phones, and most office jobs involve interacting with a computer to get work done. As a result, the demand for people who can code has skyrocketed. Countless books, interactive web tutorials, and developer boot camps promise to turn ambitious beginners into software engineers with six-figure salaries.This book is not for those people. It’s for everyone else.On its own, this book won’t turn you into a professional software developer any more than a few guitar lessons will turn you into a rock star. But if you’re an office worker, administrator, academic, or anyone else who uses a computer for work or fun, you will learn the basics of programming so that you can automate simple tasks such as the following:

Moving and renaming thousands of files and sorting them into folders

Filling out online forms, no typing required

Downloading files or copy text from a website whenever it updates

Having your computer text you custom notifications

Updating or formatting Excel spreadsheets

Checking your email and sending out pre-written responses

These tasks are simple but time-consuming for humans, and they’re often so trivial or specific that there’s no ready-made software to perform them. Armed with a little bit of programming knowledge, you can have your computer do these tasks for you.

This is one of the better books mate. Great share :)
And as you're saying, its a good "starter book", plain and simple it can allow a the dedicated people to create small softwares that automate some of those borring tasks.
One thing I've been glad for in person is a excel sheet updating software.
I could follow all my campaigns in my excel sheet, calculating roi, ctr, cr, traffic status, cpc and much more.

With a nice overview and organisation, it makes things much easier to scale.

After so many years in this field, I realized that Automation is a key factor if you want to succeed in Affiliate Marketing.I would highly advice everyone to learn programming language to automate boring tasks.